Doctor In The Box
by secooper87
Summary: During "The Book of Olparn", the Doctor is stuck in a temporal stasis box for a nearly a year. Here are some short stories about his experiences during that time. Many humorous stories, but with some more serious bits thrown in.
1. Birthday Party

This is a series of short stories about the year the Doctor spent trapped in a temporal stasis box, helping the CSI Las Vegas team to solve crimes. To discover how the Doctor was trapped in the box in the first place, please read my story, "The Book of Olparn."

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><p><strong>Birthday Party<strong>

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><p>"It's a party!" cried the Doctor. Catherine wasn't certain he should be sounding so triumphant about the whole thing.<p>

Greg blinked. He examined the scene in front of him. A dead woman, her body lying limp on the ground save for one arm, which appeared to be glued to the wall in a vertical position. The lifeless hand was pointing towards a series of graffittied scribbles along the brickwork.

"I don't see it," Greg admitted.

"Well, it's not a party by your standards," said the Doctor. "Not all nibbles and music and tuxes and whatnot. It's a Verinaxian birthday party. The whole thing is a scavenger hunt, you see. The dead body just means that the birthday boy has worked out the clue."

"How many clues are there at these Veri-what's-it parties?" Catherine asked.

"Well, you see, that sort of depends," said the Doctor. He was using that reluctant voice of his which meant that things were far worse than he wanted to admit.

"Depends on what?" asked Greg.

"On how old the Verinax is turning," said the Doctor. "Sort of like birthday candles. One victim for one year. And one for good luck. Then they go off and have cake. Well, I say cake. It's actually more like this lumpy goo sort of thing…"

"Oh, well that's just great," said Greg. "So our crime scene is just a toddler's birthday party?"

The Doctor took a sharp breath. "Yeah, not really toddlers…"

"Doctor," said Catherine, crossing her arms. "How old do these aliens get?"

The Doctor paused. "Pretty old," he admitted. He gave a small sigh. "Really old, actually. The parties usually go on for at least a day."

Greg stared at the palm sized box that he was carrying in his hand. It was the box where the Doctor was stuck, doomed to live out his days in temporal stasis. But at the moment, being trapped in a box was sounding, to Greg, like an increasingly better option.

"There was this one Verinax party on the planet Flontasine," said the Doctor. "Nearly killed off an entire race."

"These are the times when I _don't_ like having the Doctor around," said Greg. "When he starts explaining to me exactly how doomed we really are."

"Doomed? Nah. Never," insisted the Doctor.

Greg looked over to Catherine. "What would Grissom say? The evidence never lies."

"Ah, true," said the Doctor. "But you're forgetting our secret weapon."

Greg and Catherine waited for him to continue, but apparently, the Doctor had decided that he'd given them all the information they needed. Catherine tapped her foot, impatiently.

"Well?" she demanded. "What is it?"

"Me, obviously," said the Doctor. "Who else do you think stopped that party on Flontasine?"

Greg hit his head against the wall. "Great," he said. "And these aliens will just wet themselves in terror when they see you stuck inside that box, huh?"

"Yeah," said the Doctor, in that slow, thinking voice of his. "Still working on that one. Give me a second."

Catherine stared at the writing on the wall, snapping a picture of it with her Polaroid camera. "Wish we could read the clues," said Catherine.

"Huh?" asked Greg.

"The clues," said Catherine, pointing to the unintelligible writing on the wall. "If we could read them, maybe we could cut these guys off before they butcher too many people. Stop them in their tracks."

"That's brilliant!" said the Doctor. "Molto bene! Oh, Catherine Willows, you are a genius."

"And that's the cue for Crazy Doctor Plan Number One," said Greg.

"All we have to do," continued the Doctor, ignoring Greg, "is solve the puzzles before they do, find them, and convince them to break up the party."

"And cue the part where the plan falls apart," Greg said.

"We can't read the message," Catherine reiterated, in the same slow, shouty tone of voice that we Americans often use to communicate with foreigners.

"Of course not," said the Doctor. "You've never ridden in the Tardis. But you know someone who has."

"Yes, and he's locked in a box," said Greg.

Catherine had gone very still. "I think," she said, in a far quieter tone of voice, "he meant Lindsey."

Greg gawked at her. "Lindsey? She's a kid. She's not even part of the police force."

Catherine had already taken out her cell phone, and started snapping pictures. "It's just a picture," said Catherine, as she sent it to Lindsey with the accompanying text message: "Please read this aloud to me."

Thirty seconds later, Catherine's phone rang. Catherine put her daughter on speaker phone.

"Read it yourself," Lindsey said, without so much as a hello. "It's in English."

"Ah," said the Doctor. "Not so much, actually. The Tardis has telepathic translation circuits. Since you've ridden in the Tardis, you can read any language as if it was English. Well, so long as the Tardis is still around."

Lindsey gave a small sigh. "You know, you could have given me a heads up before I went to French class," she said.

"Yeah, probably should have done," the Doctor admitted.

Catherine cleared her throat. "Lindsey," she said, in her best stern-mother tone of voice.

"You're not going to be happy about this," said Lindsey. "It says, 'the gupta glasses of traxofa have no eyes, while the haxor nupta of yiporta has no nose.'"

"Didn't get a word of that," said Greg. He turned to Catherine. "You?"

"Oh! Oh!" shouted the Doctor. "It's that place. You know—in the downtown area. What's it called? Bright lights. Big sign. Neon. I think it's a casino."

"That describes about half of Las Vegas," said Greg.

"Hang on a moment." The Doctor paused. "Yes!" he cried. "The Tangiers. It's right outside the Tangiers."

Greg and Catherine looked at one another. For whatever reason, most of the crimes they solved in Las Vegas seemed to revolve around the Tangiers.

"So that's our night?" asked Catherine. "Hunting aliens across Las Vegas."

"Sounds like my kind of evening," said the Doctor. "Allons-y!"

* * *

><p>They found the ten creatures gathered around the second clue, a dead body already in their hands. Catherine found the aliens a bit disturbing. They looked a little like a children's stuffed animal come to life—big fluffy heads, large beady eyes, round squishy bodies. Except, of course, that they were carrying the kind of weapon you never wanted to lay eyes upon. Greg had described it as the "swiss army knife of weapons", and Catherine couldn't help but feel this was a fairly accurate description.<p>

"That place you found my Tardis when I first landed here in 2008," said the Doctor. "Remember? That's the second clue."

As they drove off towards the next clue, Greg asked the Doctor, "Won't they just catch up with us while we're there and kill us off?"

"Nah," said the Doctor. "Probably take them a while to work it all out. Plenty of time to spring our trap."

"Trap?" asked Catherine. "What trap?"

"Oh, didn't I tell you?" asked the Doctor, in an innocent voice. "I've worked out a plan."

The plan mainly involved transporting the dead body they'd found at the first clue to the third clue. When they arrived, they arranged the body below the message just the way they had seen it before—with its hand pointing up at the words on the wall.

"I have no idea what this is supposed to do," said Catherine.

"Very proud race, the Verinax," the Doctor explained. "They have one rule at birthday parties—no one upstages the birthday boy."

Catherine began to realize where the Doctor was headed with this line of reasoning. "You mean, they'll see this body, and think that someone has gone on ahead and started solving the clues on their own."

"Oh, yes!" cried the Doctor.

But before he could continue, Catherine heard the chattering of Verinaxian voices approaching. She shushed the Doctor, grabbed Greg's arm and dragged him behind a nearby dumpster.

The Verinax party approached with cheerful voices, but the moment they saw the body, they stopped. The Verinax at the front—the birthday boy, Catherine figured—looked mortified. He turned on his fellow party-goers, and started growling something angry sounding at them. The other party-goers, naturally, growled back. Pretty soon, it was a full blown argument, and they'd started hitting each other and punching each other and occasionally shooting at one another with weapons. No one was seriously hurt, but it was obvious even to Catherine that the party was over. The whole thing began to fall apart, with Verinax stomping off in different directions, in a complete huff.

When they had gone, Catherine and Greg snuck out from their hiding spot to make sure the coast was clear. "You don't think each of them is going to go out and kill one tenth of the population of Las Vegas?" asked Greg.

"Course not," said the Doctor. "You heard them. Party's over. Time to go home."

Greg looked over at Catherine, who just shrugged. She hadn't understood them either.

"You know, even for Las Vegas," said Greg, "this was a weird night."


	2. A History Essay By Lindsey Willows

**If I were at the Constitutional Convention**

By Lindsey Willows

I am supposed to be writing about what it would be like if I were at the Constitutional Convention. Usually, I'd just make the whole thing up, but I'm a second semester senior. I've already gotten into college, I've already taken my AP exams, and it doesn't really matter whether I fail this essay. So I'm going to write the truth.

I _was_ at the Constitutional Convention. It was back when I was thirteen years old, and was travelling around time and space with the Doctor. He was trying to take me back to Las Vegas, 2003, but—well, he's a fairly typical guy. He likes to go fast, he doesn't pay attention to the road signs, and he never, ever asks for directions. Trust me, it's bad enough with guys driving around in three dimensions. In four, it's any wonder the Doctor gets anywhere he wants to be.

The first thing I noticed, when I took my first steps in 1787, was the unbearable heat. I've lived my whole life in a desert, and to this day, I've never felt anything nearly as oppressive as that. The Doctor quickly figured out when and where we were, and he got really excited. He kept going on about how I had to meet his good friend Ben, because Ben was from Philadelphia and "Ben is just brilliant, Lindsey, absolutely brilliant!" (The Doctor likes to call everything and everyone brilliant, even when it/they are the stupidest thing since Baconnaise.)

It turns out that the Doctor's good buddy, Ben, was none other than Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of our country. What do you think when you find yourself face to face with a genius like Benjamin Franklin? If I were to meet him now, I probably would have asked him about his experiments with electricity (which the Doctor insists he was there for—he says he held the kite). Or maybe I'd ask him about the Albany Conference, or his time during the American Revolution. What thirteen-year-old Lindsey Willows actually said was, "You're way old."

To my credit, he really did look a lot older than he did in all those paintings. But still, not the best thing to say to a founding father of your country. Fortunately for me, Benjamin Franklin had a really good sense of humor, and he found the whole thing funny. He challenged the Doctor to a game of chess later that evening, but he insisted I come along to make sure the Doctor didn't cheat.

Anyways, the Doctor and Ben spent a lot of time talking, and then Ben said that he had to go back to the Convention, because their recess was almost up. The Doctor was now completely ecstatic. "Lindsey Willows," he said to me, brandishing his psychic paper, "how would you like to see a snippet of American history?"

At that time in my life, I was fairly certain that the last thing I wanted to do in the middle of a Pennsylvanian summer was listen to a bunch of old guys making boring speeches, but the Doctor was having none of it. So, next thing I knew, I was at the Pennsylvania State House, being admitted to one of the most important events in the history of the United States.

No, I didn't know they allowed women into the Constitutional Convention either. The Doctor was completely unconcerned, however. "Trust me, this would not be the first time that Ben has smuggled a few women into places he shouldn't," the Doctor told me. Which was not, exactly, what a thirteen-year-old girl wanted to hear about a 70 year old man.

Anyways, when we got into the convention hall, I wasn't really sure what to do, so I just stood around awkwardly. Not so with the Doctor. The Doctor began running around the room, shaking hands with all sorts of people and addressing them as if they were old friends. 18th century America is one of his favorite times to visit, so he really does know all the key players. It was the first time I realized that when he had been talking about "Tom" or "Sam", he'd been referring to Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams. And before you mark me down, I know that neither Thomas Jefferson nor Samuel Adams were at the convention. I'm just saying, the Doctor knows everyone.

There was a really creepy looking guy right at the front of the convention hall. He was tall with a real slanty looking face and white hair. But the creepiest thing about him were his teeth. They looked all twisted and brown and icky. After a few minutes of kibbutzing, to my great horror, the Doctor bounded over to me, grabbed my hand, and dragged me off towards the creepy man.

"George!" said the Doctor. "Good to see you again. Love the outfit. Very fetching. Great convention you've got here. This is my good friend Lindsey. Lindsey, this is George. How are Martha and the kids?"

I probably should have worked it out sooner, but up close, I got an even clearer view of those teeth, and they were even ickier. They weren't twisted, like I'd thought, but they were definitely brown—and not that coffee stain brown either. It was a deeper brown color, like the color of wood. And that was even creepier than before, because my mom works with this bug specialist, so I know all the different kinds of insects that live inside wood. And every time I looked at those wooden teeth, I just kept thinking of those creepy crawly things inside the guy's mouth, and it made me feel physically ill.

I guess that's probably the reason George Washington never smiled in his portraits.

It felt like the Doctor was talking to George for at least an hour (although the Doctor insisted it was only a minute and a half), but eventually, it was time for the constitutional convention to start up again, so we all took our seats.

When you're thirteen and you think about the words "constitutional convention" and "founding fathers", you think of a bunch of boring old guys making long-winded speeches. That was not what the Constitutional Convention was like—at least, not when I saw it. Don't think "senatorial debate". Think more like "sports bar while a game is on". These were the guys who fought a revolution to defend their ideals. They were angry, they were passionate, and they were not afraid to make themselves heard. My favorite part was when the delegates from Massachusetts started throwing spitballs at the delegates from South Carolina. I think they were angry about something to do with the roles of state legislators in federal elections.

The most chaotic part of the convention was when they started talking about slavery. You think that Massachusetts and South Carolina were at each other's throats over state legislators—you should have seen them when they started talking about slavery! It was anything but boring, I can tell you that right off the bat.

You'd expect the Doctor to be right in the middle of this debate. I mean, he's always fighting for justice and equality and that sort of thing. But to my great surprise, the Doctor wasn't even paying attention. The entire hall had turned into prime time television, and the Doctor couldn't care less.

I think it was only when the first flying saucer landed that I figured out why.

"You came here on purpose," I accused. "You knew those things were coming, and you were just around here to stop them."

"What? Me? Never," said the Doctor, as he jumped up from his chair. "Right, you stay here with Ben and George, I'll go deal with our new visitors."

And before I could protest, the Doctor was off.

By that point, James Madison had stopped writing. If anyone tells you the Founding Fathers were all boring, ugly white guys, they're lying. Well, actually, they're mostly lying. They were all white guys. But if you actually met James Madison, you'd understand why he became president. I'm talking movie star good looks, the kind of smile that makes your heart melt, and that sort of charisma that makes you feel like he's singling you out of the crowd. But I digress. By this point, James Madison had stopped writing, and most of the people at the convention had stopped their fighting to watch the flying saucers. I say most, because New York and Virginia couldn't care less what fell out of the sky—they were still at each other's throats as if nothing unusual had occurred.

"I suppose we should have expected this when the Doctor showed up," said James Madison.

George Washington just had that serious expression on his face—the one he wears in all his portraits. He turned to Benjamin Franklin, and said, "All right, Ben. This is your territory. What now?"

Benjamin Franklin gave George Washington a sly look over the top of his spectacles, and said, "Now, George, we outflank them."

There are a lot of legends about George Washington that are not necessarily true. That whole apple tree incident, for example, was complete fiction. He's a politician; of course he's going to lie. But there's one legendary quality that is a hundred percent true, and that is George Washington's reputation as a great military leader. Within minutes, he had gotten together an assortment of well-armed men—not even real soldiers, either, just average Philadelphians he picked up off the street—and rallied them together into a coherent fighting force. They surrounded the aliens, training their muskets on the extra-terrestrial visitors. The aliens laughed, and tried to fire their own weapons, but of course, the Doctor had already taken care of that. The alien guns no longer worked.

The aliens soon realized they didn't have the upper hand, and fled back into their spacecraft. The Doctor gave George Washington a wink.

James Madison, in the meantime, was keeping me safely out of harm's way. At some point, I mentioned it was lucky that we'd found so many Philadelphians with muskets.

"With the frequency of these alien invasions," said James Madison, "a well regulated militia must be necessary to the security of a free state."

Sound familiar? Go ahead, read the second amendment to the constitution again. Bet you never thought they were talking about aliens, huh?

In the end, the aliens were defeated, and the Doctor and I were back at Benjamin Franklin's house for dinner. The Doctor and Benjamin Franklin really did play several rounds of chess. The Doctor won one, Benjamin Franklin won two, and then the Doctor muttered something about how the pieces didn't feel right, and that was the only reason he was losing. He did try to cheat a few times. Once, he even did the whole, "look over there" and flipping the board around trick, which doesn't really work that well in chess. Benjamin Franklin just flipped the board back the way it was, and put the Doctor into checkmate. And by the end of the night, we were back in the Tardis, heading for Las Vegas 2003 (although we didn't make it that time, either).

I wish I could say that I came away from this with a newfound appreciation for our Founding Fathers. I wish I could say that I learned the importance of compromise, or how very different each of those thirteen colonies really were. But these were not the lessons I derived from my day at the Continental Congress. Being thirteen years old, there was one very lasting lesson I learned from that day.

After that day, I always, _always_ brushed my teeth.


	3. The Truth Is Out There

**The Truth Is Out There**

**...**

Grissom knew this was a Doctor case the moment he saw the scorch marks on the body. He called up the lab, and, eventually, got through to the Doctor.

The Doctor took in a sharp breath. "Oooh, focused burns, bruises along the side of the torso… sounds nasty. Besides the burn marks, I don't see anything particularly non-terrestrial about it. Could be humans messing around with things they really shouldn't. You don't happen to have some sort of secret, well-armed alien hunting organization like Torchwood in the States, do you?"

"There's the X-Files Fan Club," said Greg. Greg was back in the lab, using the Doctor's help to solve a separate case.

"Well-armed, Greg. The key to that sentence was 'well-armed'," said the Doctor.

"Doctor," said Greg, pointedly, "the president of the X-Files Fan Club lives in Miami. Trust me, he's well-armed."

Nick, meanwhile, had begun waving Grissom over. It didn't take Grissom long to see why. "Doctor," said Grissom, "I think we just found your non-terrestrial evidence. The bruise marks along the torso seem to indicate a six-fingered hand."

"Six fingers?" asked the Doctor. He started muttering to himself, but Grissom couldn't quite make out the words. "Too much! Need to narrow it down. Thin out the possibilities! Anything more you can give me? Blood? Saliva? Footprints? Shoes? Fashion accessories?"

Grissom looked under the vic's fingernails—that was the obvious place to look for biological evidence. If the vic fought back, the DNA evidence under the fingernails was often enough to secure a conviction.

"I've got some skin," said Grissom. "It's blue."

"Blue…" repeated the Doctor. "Blue, blue, blue… okay, blue. Good start. Lots of blue people out there. The Kwazis, the Mistrans, the Jolly Blue Giants of the Gupiatra System, Harold Bluetooth…"

Nick pointed towards the vic's shirt. It looked as if something had eaten through it. Around the hole, it looked almost… pink? Was that right?

Grissom described it to the Doctor.

"Well, that doesn't make sense," said the Doctor. "That sounds like the Brateniol, but they're a peaceful race half a galaxy away. What would Brateniols want with Earth?"

The Doctor began muttering to himself, then stopped, and fell silent. Grissom waited nearly a minute, but the Doctor said nothing.

"Doctor?" Grissom asked.

"I'm still here," said the Doctor, but he sounded far more tired now than he had a minute ago. No, not tired. Worn out. The way he'd sounded back on those tapes in 2003. "And yes, I've worked out both your problems. Greg—think shoes. That bloodstain would not have stayed on the underside of that shoe for the amount of time she claimed to have walked on it. And Grissom—they're teenagers."

"I thought you said they were aliens," said Grissom.

"Yes, teenage aliens," said the Doctor. "They come from the planet Braxis, which is about halfway across the galaxy. Trouble is, they have only basic methods of space travel on Braxis—well, I say basic. By your standards they're pretty advanced. But it would take a few months to get anywhere on Earth from Braxis. Which means it'll probably be a while before anyone arrives to stop them."

"How do you know that they're teenagers?" asked Grissom.

"Bit complicated—part of the Brateniol biology," said the Doctor. "It all has to do with the acid—it's sort of a concentrated hormonal mix that they secret when they're first going through puberty. What I think you have here, Grissom, is a bunch of naughty schoolboys running around beating people up for their lunch money."

Nick gave Grissom a look that asked what was going on, and Grissom gave him a quick summary.

"So what do we do, just arrest them?" asked Nick.

"Well, what do you usually do when you deal with naughty schoolboys?" asked the Doctor, who really shouldn't have been able to hear Nick. Grissom knew the Doctor had excellent hearing, but he'd have thought that filtered through the box and the cell phone, the Doctor might be down to human-level senses. Not so, apparently.

"Call their parents," said Grissom. He felt that familiar tension of frustration that came whenever he worked with the Doctor. "You wouldn't happen to have the number for the interplanetary operator, would you?"

"Well, yes, actually," the Doctor admitted. "Not that it would do you much good, mind. Basic space technology, remember? It'd take at least four months for the parents to get here, and that's only after the years it would take for the message to arrive on normal three dimensional wave-length patterns. You want 7th and 8th dimensional wave length patterns—to bypass the Einstein-limit through quantum differentials."

Grissom translated this for Nick as, "Apparently, that's not going to work."

"Yeah, I didn't think it would," said Nick.

"However," said the Doctor, "if I am very clever, and I am, I might just have a plan."

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><p>Grissom really hated following the Doctor's plans. It was true that the Doctor was very smart, and certainly very good at solving puzzles, but Grissom didn't trust him. Not one inch. The situation was not unprecedented; there had been other times when Grissom had sought help from incarcerated criminals. But nothing those criminals did even measured up to what the Doctor had done. As much as the others seemed to ignore it, Grissom could not. Every time he looked at that box, he thought, "Therein lies the man who killed ten billion people. The man who destroyed his world." It was not the sort of thought that made you want to trust the man with your life.<p>

And yet, somehow, Grissom kept winding up in these situations.

The Doctor had told Grissom how this was going to work ahead of time, and it had taken Grissom a while, after that, to finally agree. He and Nick had located the Brateniols lurking in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and now, parked outside and with permission from the lot's owner, Grissom was carrying the Doctor inside the building. Or rather, he was carrying the small, palm sized box that contained the Doctor.

That was the other thing about this plan that Grissom didn't like. The plan involved the Doctor talking to these blue-skinned alien creatures in some sort of garbled alien language, and Grissom would have no idea what it meant. Would the Doctor be trying to arrange some form of escape, even at the cost of Grissom's life? It was Lindsey who had the solution.

"_I_ can understand what he'll be saying," said Lindsey, "because I've travelled in the Tardis. That's what it does. It gets inside your head and translates for you. Keep a line open to me, and I'll let you know what everyone's saying."

Grissom might not trust the Doctor, but he did trust Lindsey. At least, he trusted her enough that he'd go along with the scheme. So here he was, walking into an abandoned warehouse with a box and a very discrete Bluetooth device in his ear. This had to be the nuttiest thing he'd ever done.

Nick stayed just outside, the way the Doctor had instructed, while Grissom made his way into the compound. There, standing around laughing, were the most bizarre blue blob-like aliens he had ever seen. They looked a little like blue sacks of potatoes, but with stubby little legs and beady eyes. They turned around to face him, pointing what must be guns at his head.

It was the Doctor who spoke. Lindsey, in Grissom's ear, began to translate.

"Hello, I'm the Doctor," said the Doctor. "And yes, you heard me correctly. The Doctor. _That_ Doctor. The one who fought off the Yarxil and Somtarni Mi. I just popped in to visit some friends on Earth and found you lot, mucking about on a class 5 planet." He clucked his tongue in disapproval. "That's illegal, you know."

The leader of the blue-blob alien gang grabbed the cube from Grissom's hand, and hissed. He then uttered something that Lindsey said meant, basically, "where are you now?" Although, Lindsey added, it was sort of a roundabout way of putting it. Grissom wasn't quite sure what that meant.

"Oh, I'm back here on Braxis," said the Doctor, "just catching up with the local authorities… principals, policemen, space-lane patrols…"

The blue-blob alien gang leader turned a highly unflattering shade of turquoise. He gave the Doctor a snarl that Lindsey translated as, "Oh, yeah? What do they think they can do to stop us?"

"Oh, I know, I know," said the Doctor. "You think you've still got at least four months until someone shows up. But you see, I don't travel across space. I travel across time. And I can bring your parents round any time I want."

Grissom recognized the cue, and gave Nick the signal. Outside the warehouse, Nick played the recording they'd made back at the lab—a recording that sounded mostly, but not entirely, like the Tardis materializing. The turquoise shade on the gang leader's face deepened as he heard the sound. He screeched at his fellows behind him, and they scattered, running out the back exit (presumably) towards their spaceship. The leader threw the Doctor's box hard across the room, and zipped off himself.

Grissom's eyes grew wide. "Doctor?" he asked.

Outside, he could hear a sound like a cat on a piano, which he thought might be the sound of the space ship lifting off. Then, silence. There was nothing.

"Doctor?" Grissom called a little louder. The only sound was the echo of his voice, the quiet patter of his footsteps along the ground.

Lindsey began yelling frantically in his ear. "What's going on? What happened? Where's the Doctor?"

Nick entered the room, and Grissom handed Nick the earpiece. "Calm her down," said Grissom. "I'll find the Doctor."

Nick put the earpiece into his ear, and stepped outside to talk Lindsey down.

Grissom, now alone in the warehouse, began looking through the stacks of dusty boxes and the random items the aliens had left behind, looking for a small, palm-sized box. He kept calling out for the Doctor, but there was no reply.

After five minutes, he finally found the box. It was upside down. The masking tape which Lindsey had used to hold down the communication button had snapped, which explained why the Doctor had failed to answer Grissom's call.

Grissom picked the box up, keeping it upside down. He pressed down the button. "Doctor?" he asked. "Are you okay?"

"I'm still alive," said the Doctor, but he didn't sound so happy about the prospect. "Forever and ever and ever."

"You weren't hurt when they threw you?" asked Grissom. "The box is upside down. It must have been quite a trip in there."

The Doctor was very quiet for a moment. "Gil Grissom," he said, very softly. "Do you know what these boxes were built for?"

Grissom faltered. "You said they were built as interrogation rooms," he said. "I'd presume for dangerous war criminals."

"But they weren't," said the Doctor. Grissom heard a very faint pat on what sounded vaguely like a wall. But a padded sort of wall—as if it were made of foam. "They were torture chambers, Gil. Exercises in sensory deprivation. No light, no taste, no touch. No sound except for the questions from your interrogators. No links to the outside world. Just the raw, relentless, manipulated passing of personal time."

Grissom blinked. "So when they threw you across the room…"

"I couldn't feel a thing," said the Doctor.

Grissom turned the box right side up, expecting some sort of shout or yell from the Doctor. It didn't come. "Your enemies must have been very well trained to need those sorts of interrogation tactics," said Grissom.

"The stasis boxes weren't designed for our enemy," said the Doctor, his voice barely enough to trail an echo across the warehouse walls. "No, a Dalek wouldn't talk if they spent 10,000 years locked in one of these prisons. These were never built for Daleks. These were the prisons designed for innocent civilians."

Grissom felt his breath catch in his throat.

"Did you never wonder," the Doctor continued, "why I was the only Time Lord whose genetic code was unable to open the box?"

He had wondered. He'd wondered even at the very beginning. The Doctor had said he'd "abused the privilege." Grissom had assumed that the Doctor had been releasing the enemy behind the front lines—or something equally nefarious. After all, this was the man who wiped out his home planet. But now, Grissom wasn't sure what to believe. "What happened?" he asked.

"It was Carpharlio 14," said the Doctor. "The Daleks had taken it over. They killed everyone. By the time I arrived, they'd already primed the explosives and had mostly left the planet's surface. I was looking for survivors. I thought there was no one, but then I heard something—a sniffling noise in the distance. It was a little girl—no older than ten—who, somehow, had managed to survive. She was cold and shivering, half naked and severely malnourished. And she was sobbing, because the Daleks had gone through and destroyed everyone on the planet, everyone she'd ever known. That's what Daleks did, Gil Grissom. They lived to destroy, to suck a planet dry of its natural resources and erase it from existence. This poor child, this little girl—she'd been born into slavery to the Daleks. Taken away from her parents at birth, raised by other children. She began with next to nothing, and the Daleks had taken even that away from her. By the time I found her, she couldn't even speak, she was so scared." The Doctor gave a small sigh. "I saved her," he said. "I took her away in my Tardis while the Daleks destroyed her planet. I took her to the one place in the universe that the Daleks could not get to. Gallifrey."

The Doctor paused, his breath shaky. Grissom couldn't move.

"A week later, I came back to check on her," said the Doctor. "But she wasn't there. She was nowhere. I checked the entire Citadel. Nothing. Until I stumbled into Bob's workshop. And that's when I found her."

Grissom felt his fingers trembling. He gripped the cube a little tighter in his hands, as if he were afraid he might drop it.

"They trapped her inside a temporal stasis box," the Doctor continued. His voice had gained a hard quality, as if bitterness had burned away its edges. "And they'd worked every trick in the book to get her to talk. Do you know how long she stayed alone? How long that week felt to her? A hundred years. One hundred years alone—seeing nothing, feeling nothing, tasting nothing. And in that hundred years, she'd learned to speak one word. Just one tiny word, but she was shouting it—no, she was screaming it, screaming at the top of her lungs. Do you know what that word was?"

Grissom felt his mouth run dry. He could guess.

"It was my name, Gil. Doctor. She was shouting for me. A hundred years, screaming for the last hope she thought she had for rescue. Screaming for the man who had brought her there, the man who had doomed her to that fate." The Doctor paused. "I couldn't just stand by and watch it happen. All those people who had lost their homes, their families, who were too scared of the Daleks to say a word—they were being slowly tortured for scraps of information. Just scraps. I let them out. I let them all out. But that child, she wouldn't stop screaming, even when I told her I was there, even when I wrapped my coat around her arms and offered her sweets—she just kept screaming my name, over and over again. They noticed. The others. The Time Lords. They found me. The rest of the prisoners had fled as soon as they were released, but that little girl wouldn't move, and I couldn't leave her. Not again." He gave a laugh that was so dry and mirthless, it sounded more like a cough. "Stupid, stupid Doctor."

"What happened to her?" Grissom asked.

"She died, Gil Grissom," the Doctor said. "They killed her right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do. She died calling my name, and they wouldn't even let me hold her." The Doctor took in another sharp breath. "That's what happens when you fight Daleks for too long, Gil. You become like them. Ruthless and heartless. Devoid of all empathy, all pity, all thoughts of kindness or decency."

"That's why," Grissom breathed.

"Yes," said the Doctor. "That's why I'm stuck here. That's why my own people didn't trust me. Because I couldn't trust them—not even with the life of a ten-year-old child."

Grissom wasn't sure what to say to this. He was holding this box, this box of misery and suffering, this box that filled the Doctor with memories of pain and death and sorrow—and the box that now held the Doctor in a living hell for all of eternity.

And for the first time, Gil Grissom wondered if, maybe—just maybe—he'd been mistaken about the Doctor.

"Doctor," said Grissom. "These boxes—you said that little girl felt as if she'd lived a hundred years in only a week. Tell me. Honestly. Those periods when you lose track of time, when you can't follow the conversation. How much time has passed, for you, in those few seconds when we're not talking?"

The Doctor hesitated. "So far, never more than a day," he said.

Grissom held the box in his hands, his finger turning white as it kept pressing down that button. Ten minutes later, Nick found him there, in that exact same position, standing in the middle of the warehouse, with the Doctor's box gripped firmly in his hands. By then, the Doctor was humming quietly to himself—a piece of music that neither Nick nor Grissom had ever heard before. Nick told Grissom he was leaving, and Grissom accompanied him back to the lab, without so much as a word.

Besides Sara Sidle, Grissom never told another living soul what the Doctor had told him that day.


	4. Doctor Dude By Lindsey Willows

If I were at the Gettysburg Address

By Lindsey Willows

After the profoundly successful "F" that my last essay procured, it seems that I have been given a chance to redeem myself. But honestly, if you wanted me to write a serious research paper, why do you keep picking historical time periods I've actually visited?

Yes, I was at the Gettysburg address. If it helps at all, there weren't any aliens this time. Well, except for one.

"A piece of American history!" said the Doctor. He sniffed the air, and I sniffed it as well. It had the sharp tang of sulfur and smoke. "Imagine it, Lindsey Willows. A country torn apart by war, the troops demoralized, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War finally coming to a close. And then one man gets up and gives a speech so wonderful, so inspiring, so brilliant that it will go down in history as one of the best speeches ever made. And you, Lindsey Willows, will be able to hear that speech."

So we settled into the back of the crowd, hoping to blend in with all of the army guys, and we waited for Abraham Lincoln to speak. As it turned out, he wasn't the only one to make a speech that day, which meant that we had to wait.

The Gettysburg Address is famous not only for its incredible power and inspiration, but its conciseness. Apparently, not so with the other speakers who were presenting that day. Being thirteen, I was a highly impatient sort of person.

"Dude, this is taking forever," I said.

The Doctor gave me a surprised look. "Did you just call me 'dude'?" he asked.

I don't know what happens in England or France or on the Planet Zog, but as far as I can tell, all American teenagers eventually go through the "dude phase." This is the phase in a teenager's life when they eschew all normal name-calling procedures in favor of the far more universal title of "dude". Apparently, teenagers on the Doctor's home planet never went through this phase.

"No," I lied.

"You know," said the Doctor, "I don't think I've ever been called a dude before. And I've been to the 1950's."

I'm sure my face must have been bright red at that point. Teenagers tend to pick up a number of embarrassing habits, and it is all the more embarrassing when one of those habits is brought to the forefront. Especially when the person you've just addressed as "dude" is anything but. The Doctor is most certainly _not_ a "dude." He is tall and skinny, he likes to wear a suit and tie with red trainers, he enjoys solving math puzzles in his spare time, and every time he wants to look particularly smart, he shoves his "brainy specs" onto the tip of his nose. So no, certainly not a dude. In any sense of the term.

Maybe this is why the Doctor found the whole thing so amusing.

The Doctor now had a twinkle in his eye, which meant that he was not about to let this go. "Are there other dudes around?" he asked. "Or is it just me? Doctor Dude?"

"Shut up," I said.

He gave a theatrical pout. "Oh, come on," he said. "Valiant soldiers, fighting to abolish slavery? Military leaders heading up the charge? Surely one of them is dude enough to deserve the title."

"Dude, just shut up," I snapped. It was only after I said it that I realized my mistake. "I mean, just shut up," I tried to correct.

The Doctor shot me a very wide grin. "Doctor Dude, shutting up," he said with a wink.

Given how hard I was blushing, it was any wonder I lasted long enough to hear the Gettysburg Address. I really thought I'd die from embarrassment.

I liked the actual Gettysburg Address—well, I guess everyone liked it. It's one of those speeches that can inspire you even as words printed on a piece of paper, but with Abraham Lincoln's voice booming out across a crowd of war-weary soldiers, the speech was enough to give me goose bumps.

Afterwards, the Doctor grabbed my hand and dragged me towards the front, so he could introduce me to "my good friend Abe". Because of course, the Doctor knew Abraham Lincoln. The Doctor knows everybody.

Abraham Lincoln gave me a very charming smile, and asked what I thought of the speech.

"Dude," I said, before I could stop myself, "that rocked."

The Doctor was almost on the floor laughing. Lincoln was highly perplexed by the compliment. I took the only option I felt I had left, and fled.

The Doctor met me back at the Tardis. "You, Lindsey Willows," he said, "have a remarkable way with words."


	5. Murder Games

**Murder Games**

* * *

><p><em>The first rule of marketing is that the Doctor would make a terrible focus group.<em>

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><p>"So she walks into the interrogation room," David Hodges continued, "and suddenly, there's a scream, and by the time you come in and see her, the only thing left of Catherine Willows is a pile of ash." David leaned back in his chair, putting his arms behind his head. He gave his fellow lab technicians a big smile. "So?" he asked. "What do you do?"<p>

David Hodges, the Trace Technician, had been amusing his fellow lab technicians by testing a new board game he had developed. It was a board game where you got to solve hypothetical murders, as if you were a real CSI. The game had been fairly popular around the lab, and that's when the Doctor decided to play.

"Lick the ash," said the Doctor.

All the technicians in the room stared at the temporal stasis box on the table.

"Hang on, you'd what?" asked Wendy. She made a face.

From the doorway, Greg rolled his eyes. "When we take him out into the field with us, he always asks us to lick things," he said.

"Hygienic issues aside, wouldn't that contaminate the evidence at the crime scene?" asked Archie.

"Well, how else do you expect me to establish the chemical composition of the ash?" the Doctor demanded.

David Hodges gave a self-important cough. "You could send it to trace," he suggested.

"What, and spend all that time waiting for results?" asked the Doctor. "One little taste. Nothing much! Just a lick! That's all."

"Doctor, doesn't it bother you that you'd be… well, eating Catherine's remains?" Wendy asked.

"Not her remains," said the Doctor, offhandedly. "Probably just a teleportation beam. Saw one of those in the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Around 200,100. Catherine's fine. Alive and well. Well, I say alive and well. Could be alive and surrounded by a large number of Daleks. But still. Alive. At least for the moment. Nothing a Tardis can't fix right up."

"For the sake of the game," David cut in, "let's just say that Catherine is dead. Not… teleported or captured by aliens or anything. So… you send the sample to the miracle of modern science that is Trace?"

The Doctor scoffed. "Not likely," he said. "I'll stick to licking."

"He means yes," said Archie, just for the sake of moving the game forward. "Just send it to trace. What are the trace results?"

"Wait and see," said David.

The Doctor gave an exasperated sigh, as if this alone would completely make his point. The others ignored him.

"No body for an autopsy," Wendy pointed out. "But she _did_ have time to scream before she died. How long was the scream?"

"Not long," answered David. "About a second."

"You know you can't market this game in the UK," said the Doctor. "They'd just say to check the CCTV cameras. Take all the fun out of it."

Wendy arched an eyebrow. "What are CCTV cameras?"

"They have these video cameras all over England," said Archie. "They catch all public activities on tape. So someone's watching you at all times."

"Hold up," said Greg. "That's real? I saw that on the Simpsons. I thought it was a joke."

"Nope," said the Doctor. "They say it's for terrorism, but I think it's just Torchwood's way of keeping tabs on me."

Wendy's mouth had fallen open. "They have video cameras spying on you all the time?" she asked, incredulous. "But… but that's just… obscene! It's barbaric! It's like Big Brother, but… real!"

David, meanwhile, was telling his tape recorder that marketing the game in England may have drawbacks.

"How does the air feel?" asked the Doctor.

"What?" asked Wendy. "A little nippy. Why? What does that have to do with invasions of privacy?"

"I mean, in David's scenario," said the Doctor. He gave a grunt of annoyance. "Humans!"

David frowned. "It's air conditioned," he said. "Sort of like the air is in any room in the lab."

"Not… tingly?" asked the Doctor. "Could be a high energy weapon. Plasma cannon or Electron Buster. Nasty things. Give off this tingly feeling in the air."

"No," said David. "It's not aliens, Doctor. It's just a normal crime scene investigation."

"Hmmm…," mused the Doctor. "Don't suppose you'll be able to tell me if you sense any temporal distortion in the area?"

"No temporal distortion!" David said. He was starting to get snappy.

"Okay, okay!" said the Doctor, defensively. "Just asking. No harm in asking, is there? I mean, you're assuming that I just happened to stumble into this scenario, and knowing my track record, there are usually either aliens or temporal instabilities or…"

Greg leaned against the open door, a small smile spreading across his face. "Hey, that's not bad," he said, cutting off the Doctor mid-sentence.

All the technicians in the room spun their heads around to face Greg. "What?"

David was beginning to think this had been a bad idea. "I told the Doctor already, there are no futuristic sci-fi alien things in this game," he insisted.

Greg pointed at the box on the table. "No, I mean, I get it," said Greg. "What the Doctor's doing. He's going through all his senses. Taste—that's the licking. Sight—with the cameras. Touch—the tingle in the air. Then that last question with time—I'm assuming you have some sort of time sense?"

"Time Lord," said the Doctor, as if that clarified everything.

"So what's left?" asked Archie. "Hearing and smell. Anything from those, David?"

David Hodges had clearly not expected this line of questioning. It took a little time to rearrange his thoughts. But before he could do so, the Doctor had already chimed in.

"Oh, nearly forgot," said the Doctor. "What's behind the one way glass?"

"Room's locked," said David, proudly.

Greg laughed at this. "He can see through the one-way glass," he said, pointing his thumb at the Doctor.

"Twenty-first century, right?" asked the Doctor. "No alien technology? Can't be a deadlock seal. Sonic Screwdriver should do the trick."

Everyone was looking over at David Hodges. He was starting to feel a little flustered. This was certainly not the best test group for his board game. "There's… it's… there's a series of mirrors inside."

"Oh! Oh!" shouted Wendy. "Dust for fingerprints."

The Doctor gave a pffft sound. "Well, you've just made that too easy, now, haven't you?"

"I was expecting you to take more time getting the door open," David admitted.

"Wait, you've solved it?" asked Wendy. She folded her arms over her chest.

"Course I've solved it," said the Doctor. "If you're going to restrict all the possibilities to one time and place, it's not really all that hard."

The technicians in the room were all shocked. Greg didn't seem surprised. He just rolled his eyes again. "Yep, same old Doctor," he said.

"So what's the answer?" asked David. He had a mischievous grin on his face. He was certain there was no way that the Doctor had worked everything out with so little information.

"Well, there's a nice little window in that room with all the mirrors," said the Doctor. "So solar power seems our most obvious bet. But, course, can't use a focused pinpoint of light to send a woman up in flames. So I'm going to guess someone dissected some of the equipment in the room. Bit of jiggery pokery, shake up the photons a little, and bang! Combustion source."

"But that wouldn't make Catherine go up in flames," said Archie.

"It would with an accelerant," said Greg.

"Bingo!" cried the Doctor. "See, that's what the scream was. Bucket above the door. Catherine walks in, bucket comes crashing down. Little scream. Then she shuts the door, and whomp! No more sound. Soundproof, remember? The scream you heard wasn't from the murder. You never heard the murder. The murder itself was silent."

"But you could check the tapes in the adjoining room," said Wendy.

David Hodges gave her a sideways smile. "And when you do, you discover…"

"That all the equipment has been taken apart and put back together," said Greg. "The Doctor just said that, David. There wouldn't be anything on those recordings."

David Hodges frowned. "So who did it?" he asked the Doctor.

"Greg," said the Doctor.

David nearly jumped out of his chair. He hadn't been expecting the Doctor to get it right. "How…?"

"He's the only one with the technical knowledge to build the device," said the Doctor.

Greg just gave a self-important nod. "All in the job description," he said.

"Honestly, David," said the Doctor, "if you want this game to go anywhere, you have to give people a bit more of a challenge. I mean, if you aren't going to allow trans-temporal travel, at least throw in a few aliens."

Wendy looked over at Greg. "You don't look at all surprised by how quickly he worked this out," she said.

Greg shrugged. "He's been solving cases from inside of a box for about a month and a half now," he said. "What did you expect?"

Archie and Wendy looked at one another, the shock still evident on their faces. Greg heard the sound of footsteps from the corridor behind him, and when he turned, he found Grissom approaching.

"Having fun?" Grissom asked.

"What do we have this time?" asked Greg, already walking over to pick up the temporal stasis box from its place on the table.

"Arson case," said Grissom. He noticed the shocked looks on the technicians' faces, and sighed. "The Doctor worked it out in about five minutes, didn't he?"

"Not even," said Greg, following Grissom out of the room, the Doctor's box in hand.

As they left, David Hodges brought out his tape recorder. "Note," he said. "Game should not be played by time travelling alien smart-asses."


End file.
